Moral character or character is an evaluation of a particular individual's durable moral Morality is a sense of behavioral conduct that differentiates intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good (or right) and bad (or wrong). A moral code is a system of morality (for example, according to a particular philosophy, religion, culture, etc.) and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code. Immorality is qualities. The concept of character can imply a variety of attributes including the existence or lack of virtues Virtue is moral excellence. A virtue is a trait or quality deemed to be morally excellent and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being such as integrity Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcomes. In western ethics, integrity is regarded as the quality of having an intuitive sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions.[citation needed] Integrity can be regarded as the opposite of hypocrisy,, courage Courage, also known as bravery, fortitude, will, and intrepidity, is the ability to confront fear, pain, risk/danger, uncertainty, or intimidation. "Physical courage" is courage in the face of physical pain, hardship, death, or threat of death, while "moral courage" is the ability to act rightly in the face of popular, fortitude Courage, also known as bravery, fortitude, will, and intrepidity, is the ability to confront fear, pain, risk/danger, uncertainty, or intimidation. "Physical courage" is courage in the face of physical pain, hardship, death, or threat of death, while "moral courage" is the ability to act rightly in the face of popular, honesty Honesty refers to a facet of moral character and denotes positive, virtuous attributes such as integrity, truthfulness, and straightforwardness along with the absence of lying, cheating, or theft, and loyalty Loyalty, is faithfulness or a devotion to a person, country, group, or cause, or of good behaviors or habits Habits are routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously, without one being conscious about them. Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habituation is an extremely simple form of learning, in. Moral character primarily refers to the assemblage of qualities that distinguish one individual from another - although on a cultural level, the set of moral behaviors to which a social group adheres can be said to unite and define it culturally as distinct from others. Psychologist Lawrence Pervin defines moral character as "a disposition to behave expressing itself in consistent patterns of functioning across a range of situations" (Pervin 1994, p. 108).

Overview

The word "character" is derived from the Greek word charaktêr, which was originally used of a mark impressed upon a coin. Later and more generally, it came to mean a point by which one thing was told apart from others (Timpe 2007). There are two approaches when dealing with moral character: Normative ethics Normative ethics is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when we think about the question “how ought one act, morally speaking?” Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics because it examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, while meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral involve moral standards that exhibit right and wrong conduct. It is a test of proper behavior and determining what is right and wrong. Applied ethics Applied ethics is, in the words of Brenda Almond, co-founder of the Society for Applied Philosophy, "the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment". It is thus a term used to describe attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally involve specific and controversial issues along with a moral choice, and tend to involve situations where people are either for or against the issue (Timpe 2007).

In 1982, Campbell and Bond proposed the following as major factors in influencing character and moral development: heredity Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause a species to evolve. The study of heredity in biology is called genetics,, early childhood experience, modeling by important adults and older youth, peer influence, the general physical and social environment, the communications media, what is taught in the schools and other institutions, and specific situations and roles that elicit corresponding behavior (Huitt 2004, §Impacting Moral and Character Development).

The field of business ethics examines moral controversies relating to the social responsibilities of capitalist business practices, the moral status of corporate entities, deceptive advertising, insider trading, basic employee rights, job discrimination, affirmative action and drug testing.

History

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a historical account of some important developments in philosophical approaches to moral character. A lot of attention is given to Plato Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Plato was originally a, Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most and Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism and socialism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "'s views, since they all follow the idea of moral character after the Greeks. Marx accepts Aristotle's insight that virtue and good character are based on a sense of self-esteem and self-confidence.

Plato Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Plato was originally a believed that the soul is divided into three parts of desire: Rational, Appetitive, or Spirited. [1] In order to have moral character, we must understand what contributes to our overall good and have our spirited and appetitive desires educated properly, so that they can agree with the guidance provided by the rational part of the soul.

Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most tells us that there are two different kinds of human excellences, excellences of thought and excellences of character. His phrase for excellences of character -- êthikai aretai -- we usually translate as moral virtue or moral excellence. When we speak of a moral virtue Virtue is moral excellence. A virtue is a trait or quality deemed to be morally excellent and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being or an excellence of character, the emphasis is on the combination of qualities that make an individual the sort of ethically admirable person that he is [2]. Aristotle defines virtuous character at the beginning of Book II in Nicomachean Ethics Nicomachean Ethics is the name normally given to Aristotle's most well-known work on ethics: “Excellence of character, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect”. On Aristotle's view, good character is based on two naturally occurring psychological responses which most people experience without difficulty: our tendency to take pleasure from self-realizing activity and our tendency to form friendly feelings toward others under specific circumstances. Based on his view, virtually everyone is capable of becoming better and they are the ones responsible for actions that express (or could express) their character. [3]

Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led the United States through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery. Before his election in 1860 as the first Republican president, Lincoln, reared in a once said, "Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." [4]

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism and socialism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: " was interested in attending to smaller democratic workplaces. Marx's earlier Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is famous for the discussion of how the organization of work under capitalism alienates workers and encourages them to accept the values of capitalist society. Workers who are committed to capitalist values are only interested in advancement for themselves and are distrustful of others' seemingly good intentions, and they view others primarily as competitors for scarce positions. Given these attitudes, they are prone to a number of vices, including lack of generosity, cowardice, and intemperance.[5]

Biblical Definition

The Bible The Bible refers to collections of sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity. There is no single version: both the individual books and their order vary. The Hebrew Bible contains 24 books that were rearranged into 39 by Christian denominations, while complete Christian Bibles range from the 66 books of the Protestant canon to 81 books in the defines character as any behavior or activity that reflects the character of God. The Book of Genesis The Book of Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible, and the first of five books of the Torah, called the Pentateuch in the Christian Old Testament says that God created man in his own image. Modern Christian Theology Theology is the study of a god or, more generally, the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, or of spirituality states that this means that humans are created to act in accordance to the will of their creator. In general, Christians A Christian (pronounced /ˈkrɪstʃən/ ) is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians believe is the Messiah (the Christ in Greek-derived terminology) prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, and the son of God. Most Christians believe in the doctrine of believe that this means that the morally correct thing to do is reflect the character of the creator.

(Note, this article requires more information)

Scientific Experiments Disputing the Existence of Moral Character

The Milgram experiment The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first was a study done in the early 1960’s that helped measure a person’s moral character. Subjects from different socioeconomic groups were tested on their willingness to press a buzzer that caused the subject in another room to experience great pain and distress for giving a wrong answer to a test question. When the subjects raised questions about what they are being asked to do, the experimenter applied mild pressure in the form of appealing to the need to complete the experiment. The Milgram experiment caused a huge amount of criticism among individuals.In post-experiment interviews with subjects Milgram noted that many were completely convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing. Although the subjects may have had moral values, many were criticized on whether they were a truly moral character. [6]

In one experiment that was done, the moral character of a person was based on whether or not a person had found a dime in a public phone booth. The findings were that 87% of subjects who found a dime in a phone booth helped somebody in need, while only 4% of those who did not find a dime helped. It is very troubling that people would be influenced by such morally trivial factors in their choice whether to provide low-cost assistance to others. Doris raises the issue of ecological validity—do experimental findings reflect phenomena found in natural contexts. He recognizes that these results are counterintuitive to the way most of us think about morally relevant behavior.[7]

Another experiment that was done that asked college students at Cornell to predict how they would behave when faced with one of several moral dilemmas, and to make the same predictions for their peers. Again and again, people predicted that they would be more generous and kind than others. Yet when the time came to put their money where their mouths were, most kept their wallet in their pockets. In psychological terms, the experimental subjects were successfully anticipating the base rate of moral behavior and accurately predicting how often others, in general, would be self-sacrificing.[8]

Criticism

Recently, a number of philosophers and social scientists have begun to question the very presuppositions that theories of moral character and moral character traits are based on. Due to the importance of moral character to issues in philosophy, it is unlikely that the debates over the nature of moral character will disappear anytime soon.[9]

Situationism can be understood as composed of three central claims [10]:

Non-robustness Claim: moral character traits are not consistent across a wide spectrum of trait-relevant situations. Whatever moral character traits an individual has are situation specific. Consistency Claim: while a person’s moral character traits are relatively stable over time, this should be understood as consistency of situation specific traits, rather than robust traits. Fragmentation Claim: a person’s moral character traits do not have the evaluative integrity Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcomes. In western ethics, integrity is regarded as the quality of having an intuitive sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions.[citation needed] Integrity can be regarded as the opposite of hypocrisy, suggested by the Integrity Claim. There may be considerable disunity in a person’s moral character among her situation-specific character traits.

According to Situationists, the empirical evidence favors their view of moral character over the Traditional View. Hugh Hartshorne and M. A. May’s study of the trait of honesty among school children found no cross-situational correlation. A child may be consistently honest with his friends, but not with his parents or teachers. From this and other studies, Hartshorne and May concluded that character traits are not robust but rather “specific functions of life situations” [11]

A second challenge to the traditional view can be found in the idea of moral luck. This idea is that moral luck occurs when the moral judgment of an agent depends on factors beyond the agent’s control. There are number of ways that moral luck can motivate criticisms of moral character. It is similar to “the kind of problems and situations one faces” [Nagel, Thomas (1993). "Moral Luck," in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (State University of New York Press): 57-61].If all of an agent’s moral character traits are situation-specific rather than robust, what traits an agent manifests will depend on the situation that she finds herself in. But what situations an agent finds herself in is often beyond her control and thus a matter of situational luck. Whether moral character traits are robust or situation-specific, some have suggested that what character traits one has is itself a matter of luck. If our having certain traits is itself a matter of luck, this would seem to undermine one’s moral responsibility for one’s moral character, and thus the concept of moral character altogether. As Owen Flanagan and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty write [12]: It [the morality and meaning of an individual’s life] will depend on luck in an individual’s upbringing, the values she is taught, the self-controlling and self-constructing capacities her social environment enables and encourages her to develop, the moral challenges she faces or avoids. If all her character, not just temperamental traits and dispositions but also the reflexive capacities for self-control and self-construction, are matters of luck, then the very ideas of character and agency are in danger of evaporation

A moral character trait is a character trait for which the agent is morally responsible. If moral responsibility is impossible, however, then agents cannot be held responsible for their character traits or for the behaviors that they do as a result of those character traits.

A similar argument has also recently been advocated by Bruce Waller According to Waller, no one is "morally responsible for her character or deliberative powers, or for the results that flow from them.… Given the fact that she was shaped to have such characteristics by environmental (or evolutionary) forces far beyond her control, she deserves no blame [nor praise]"[13].

Notes

References and further reading

• Blum, Lawrence (2003). "Review of Doris's Lack of Character" Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. link
• Homiak, Marcia (2008). "Moral Character", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). link
• Huitt, W. (2004). "Moral and character development", Educational Psychology Interactive, Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Retrieved 10 Oct. 2008. link
• Pervin, Lawrence (1994). "A Critical Analysis of Current Trait Theory", Psychological Inquiry 5, pp. 103-113.
• Timpe, Kevin (2007). "Moral Character", The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, J. Fieser & B. Dowden (eds.). link

Categories: Theology Theology is the study of God from a religious perspective. It has been commonly defined as reasoned discourse about God or the gods, or more generally about religion or spirituality. It can be contrasted with religious studies, which is the study of religion from a secular perspective. Theologians use various forms of analysis and argument to help | Morality | Virtue ethics

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